this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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I've been thinking for some time that football is really this tribal ancestry thing that humans can't let go of. For the spectators they feel like they are part of a righteous army in a glorious battle, with the exception they they are safe from harm but more importantly they are safe regardless the outcome. If they win, it is their win. If they lose, it was the players that lost. They chant and scream during the game as if it would have some magical impact on the results, in their minds it does. Then then game is over and they have all the hormones pumping as if they have survived the battle that they need to channel into something. But having done nothing really and nor being capable of anything that the team creates, they do what they can and they destroy. Not as individual but as the team.
That doesn't explain why it's mostly common in football though. Dutch Grand Prix hosts 600k people and saw Verstappen win multiple times, with thunderous cheers. Nothing even remotely like this happens.
It might be ritual? It has become accepted in the football context.
The numbers still aren't in any way comparable, the champions league final has hundreds of millions of people watching. If you were anywhere in Paris last night you were hearing screaming, honking and fireworks until 3 in the morning, the streets were filled like it was a carnival.
The person I was responding to called it "like being in a righteous army", that doesn't apply to millions watching on their couch. I've been working in a venue that hosts Champions League matches regularly for almost 2 decades. What the person I responded to said is very accurate, and very exclusive to football.
There's no football stadium in the world that even remotely holds the amount of spectators a grand prix pulls.
I don't know if you've ever lived in a city with a top tier football team. I've never watched a PSG game but I still know whenever they score a goal because the entire city starts shouting. During important games every cafe with a TV has a crowd in front of it watching. The entire city is the stadium.
I get what you're saying but this is in Toulouse, this wasn't even "their" team. Lots of people watch, I get it. But I simply refuse to accept that this behaviour is just a numbers game.
They're emulating what's happening in Paris, they want to be part of the biggest sporting event of the year. 10 million people watched the final in France, that's 1/6 of the french population (and that's just the legal streams). No other sport gets that kind of motion, not by a country mile. The world cup gets a billion and a half globally. Genuinely, if you were in the streets in Paris on saturday you wouldn't be questioning it, within a half hour of the game ending there were enough people outside to block all the traffic, and I live on the edge of the city, that's what it was like at its lightest. No other event gets that many people in the streets, no protest gets that large. It's literally the biggest event these kids will see in their lives, outside maybe of the Hajj.
Religions are nothing if they don't have numbers behind them. If you win the numbers game you've got the game in the bag.
I only did team sports in high school, but even in that case, there was a big difference between "everyone in the school is cheering for you" and "nobody gives a shit." If everybody's cheering for you, you're more likely to exhaust yourself and do all you can to win. If nobody cares, you're more prone to think: I'll just take it easy, I'm only here for exercise... Obviously the dynamics are different for the pros, but I think it's something analogous.
The dynamics aren't all that different for pros, it's more a case of pros trying to minimize that impact because you can't let your performance rely on vibes.
Football is the world's largest religion...and it comes with everything a religion comes with.